2013 Spring Poetics Seminar: Technological Autobiography

Instructor: Ted Hiebert

About the Conference

We live in a world of dissolving boundaries—between authors and readers, performers and audience, devices and bodies, politics and materiality, information and uncertainty. Many theorists of artistic and digital culture see this as a direct consequence of electronic technology, which stretches our bodies and minds in ever new and challenging ways. As technology connects us to each other and extends our cognitive and social capabilities, so too does it re-write the codes of political, intellectual and artistic engagement that govern questions of what we do as creative practitioners, and why.

In such a context, the concept of poetics becomes increasingly complex, requiring not only a reflection on the personal and subjective intricacies of practice, but necessitating an in-depth look at how media themselves govern, shape and contextualize the practices we use them to engage. As we use a medium, so too does it use us. At stake in this relationship is both the expressive capacity of the individual and the creative potentialities of media themselves.

This conference is dedicated to embodied explorations of technology, that is, technology seen as a creative medium for everyday experience. This might be seen as a mapping of poetics onto the autobiographical intricacies of life—extending aesthetic theories of participation into the realm of performative living. This might be explored as a metaphor for creative practice—where the understanding of technology serves as a catalyst for re-thinking relationships to the media we engage. This might be taken as a challenge for subjectivity and the fashioning of identity—in which the understanding of oneself technologically yields new creative possibilities for autobiographical living.

Topics may include: the shifting role of the medium, author/artist or reader/audience in a technological world; he importance of participation, inter subjectivity or community in artistic practice; the presence or absence of poetics in a climate of social, intellectual or creative uncertainty; the constitution or obliteration of identity through the act of artistic creation; devices and/or media as contexts for creative self-constitution or identity collaboration; the politics and complexities of digital culture and creative practice

Student Papers

Ellen Bauer, “The Technology of Anxiety”Marcus Bingham, “Frame By Frame”John Boucher, “TechnoloME: My Ghost-life in Machines”Susan Brown, “Technology & Victorian Travel Writing”Chelsea Carter, “Involuntary Soundtracks and Musical Submersion”Margaret Chiavetta, “Technology for Escaping and Technology That is Inescapable”Sandy D’Entremont, “A Question of Speed”Kelle Gaddis, “A Technological Autobiography of Time: Force or Illusion?”Aimee Harrison, “I Grew Up in a Mini-Van: a transformation from passenger to poet through mobility”Andrew Huskamp, “Dimensional Poetics”Talena Lachelle, “Maternity, Identity and the IUD”Lauren Light, “How to Revive a Body”Jay Loomis, “The Seeds of the Fantastic: Technology and Humanity Through the Lens of Fantasy and Science Fiction”Tiare Mathison, “Gathering the Fragments”Michael Paschall, “Infinite Body”Billy Phillips, “Living to eat, the situational awareness and saving power of pleasure”J.D. Satlin, “Communication in an A-tonal Society: Difficulties of Lived Sincerity & Irony in an Age of Instant Transmission and Feedback”Diana Savora, “The Community of One”Kat Seidemann, “Between the Lines: Identity Formation”

For additional information on the 2013 Poetics Seminar Conference please see the conference program.